Cyberspace is more than ever the new horizon of the struggle for individual freedom at the beginning of this 21st century – and, especially, for freedom of information. The incident which occurred in Parliament in London on December 3rd provided a new and spectacular example. The substance of the case is the scandal, revealed several months ago, concerning the wide-scale surveillance activities implemented by the NSA, the American National Security Agency. On Tuesday, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, a newspaper which played a leading role in the description of the NSA's methods, was questioned by a British parliamentary commission in charge of home affairs. What was he accused of? -nothing less than of having threatened national security and of lacking in patriotism.

Alan Rusbridger replied point by point. No, national security was not threatened by the work of a newspaper which had carefully selected and analyzed the news which it chose to circulate about the scanning by the NSA of millions of items of personal digital data. No, patriotism was not a relevant issue. To the extraordinary question which the president of the commission asked him “Do you love your country?” Alan Rusbridger replied: “We are patriots and one of the things which make us patriots is the democracy and freedom of our press.”Le Monde can only express its total support to Mr Rusbridger and the teams at the Guardian who investigated, as we also did, the activities of the NSA and its supporters in Europe. National security is not endangered by this activity for the good reason that our newspapers never, in any way, engage in the divulgation of the documents considered without due care and attention. Journalism does not consist in the hasty and indiscriminate mass distribution of data. A choice is made in a responsible manner. It is based on a precise evaluation of the interest which this information may represent for public discussion in a democracy.

To suggest that – as the disparagers of the Guardian in the United Kingdom do, whether they be elected MP's, government officials or heads of intelligence agencies – that, by working on the Snowden documents the media are acting to the benefit of terrorist groups, falls within the province of falsehood and of a clear desire to divert the discussion.

The real debate concerns the safeguards which must surround the cyber espionage of citizens by the intelligence services in the name of anti-terrorism. It concerns the lack of transparency and the fact that the surveillance programmes have been set up without the least preliminary democratic debate.

The digital surveillance by the NSA, comparable to a planet-level Big Brother, denies the private sphere and abolishes the secrecy of correspondence. This surveillance makes it possible to track everything we communicate, who we are in contact with, etc.

The surge in technologies and the use which is made of them by state agencies has given rise to a threat to our freedom. The public has a right to know. National security cannot be defined in the absence of any democratic control. This vigilance cannot be exercised without the free working of the press – without intimidation.